Motion Photography and the Beginnings of Cinema Eadweard

Motion Photography and the Beginnings of Cinema Eadweard Muybridge, 1879

Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830 1904), AKA “Helios” San Francisco Landscape photographer, Valley of the Yosemite, ca. 1867 Muybridge’s five month trip to the Yosemite Valley in 1867 yielded 260 published views, 160 of them stereographs. His were among the most celebrated images taken of the Valley.

Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830 1904), Galloping Horse, Motion Study: Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at 1. 40 gait over the Palo Alto track, June 19, 1879, wet plate collotype, a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras Muybridge began the project in 1872. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity.

Eadweard Muybridge, The Zoopraxiscope, projector presented in autumn of 1879 The private gathering that watched the first Zoopraxiscope projections at Mayfield Grange, the home of Muybridge's sponsor Leland Stanford at Palo Alto farm, in the autumn of 1879 has the distinction of being one of the earliest motion picture audiences.

Zoopraxiscope disc and detail of stencil

Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Plate 455, “Woman Throwing herself on heap of hay”, 1887, collotype, The Pennsylvania Project 1883 – 1887, University of Pennsylvania

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Man Shoveling (Self Portrait), 1895 University of Pennsylvania

Thomas Eakins (American Realist Painter, 1844 1916), George Reynolds: Seven Photographs, 1883, albumen print, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (lower left) Motion Study: male running jump to left, ca. 1885, (lower right) Motion Study: female nude, blindfolded, walking to left, ca. 1885 Eakins approached the human figure with the analytical eye of a scientist.

(left) Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, oil on canvas, 1884 85 (right) Eakins's Students at the Site for Swimming, albumen print, ca. 1884

Etienne-Jules Marey (French Physiologist 1830– 1904), Photographic Gun: camera with a rotating plate capable of taking rapid sequence of separate images. (below) Marey, Pelicans in Flight, c. 1882 Marey saw Muybridge’s motion photographs when they were published in Paris in 1878. Muybridge’s multi camera system wasn’t scientific enough for Marey.

Marey, Chronophotographic study of Man Pole Vaulting, 1890 1891, albumen silver print Marey used dry photographic plates, faster than the wet plates Muybridge used, and an ordinary camera with its lens left open. Behind the lens, Marey put a rotating metal disk that had from one to ten slots cut into it at even intervals. As the subject, dressed in white, moved in front of a black background, the rotating shutter exposed the glass plate, creating a sequence of images.

Thomas Eakins, Motion Study using Marey’s wheel camera, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1885

Edgar Degas (French Realist/Impressionist Painter and Sculptor, 1834 1917) Frieze of Dancers, 1895, oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 79” Multiple views of a single figure, an approach that violated the traditional notion that a painting must represent a unity of time, place, and viewpoint

Giacomo Balla (Italian Futurist Painter) Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Leash in Motion), 1912, oil on canvas, 35 x 45” Antonio Bragaglia (Italian Futurist Photographer), Change of Position, 1911, gelatin silver print

Giacoma Balla, Swallows, 1913, oil on canvas

(right) Lucien Bull (Marey assistant) with Marey wheel camera photographing soap bubble, 1906 (left) Bull, Soap Bubble Bursting, 1904, silver gelatin print from a film strip This stereoscopic camera took 54 pairs of pictures per second.

The Movies Begin First Kodak camera, 1888 Celluloid Film "You press the button, we do the rest" Drawings submitted by George Eastman for his new camera, The Kodak, showing detailed views of the camera's exterior and the interior with its barrel shutter and roll film transport designs.

Kinetograph motion picture camera, William Dickson (British inventor 1860 1935) under the employ of Thomas Edison Camera (the first to use perforated film stock) for producing subjects for the Kinetoscope peepshow machine. Developed over several years, shot commercially produced movies from 1893 and patented in 1897

Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, 1894. The loop of film was about 45 feet long. Edison to George Eastman on receiving 50 ft celluloid roll: "That's it we've got it now work like hell!"

(center) Man Using a Sound Version of the Kinetoscope (right) Kinetoscope parlor in San Francisco, ca. 1894 (bottom right) Sandow, the Modern Hercules, 1894 (Still from strip of the Edison Kinetoscope) B&W : 39 feet, Directed by W. K. L. Dickson and William Heise, Eugen Sandow (Friedrich Muller), Edison Manufacturing Company production Thomas Edison wanted "an instrument that does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. "

The Black Maria, Edison’s film studio, part of an industrial research laboratory Edison built in West Orange, New Jersey Edison’s “inventors” in West Orange, c. 1890

Within twelve years of its invention, film grammar is being determined in The Great Train Robbery the cut, the close up, parallel action along with the social and economic structures that would integrate cinema into the pattern of people’s daily lives and make it pay for itself. The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed and photographed by Edwin Porter, 10 minutes long, with 14 scenes, filmed in New Jersey at Edison’s studios and along the Lackawanna railroad. Actor: Justus Barnes